1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus monitoring system and method, an image forming apparatus and a control method therefor, and a program for implementing the method, and more particularly relates to a setup technique relating to the image forming apparatus monitoring system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in an image forming apparatus monitoring system, to register image forming apparatuses to be monitored, in the monitoring system, a service man who performs installation of the image forming apparatus and management of a monitoring apparatus registers in advance information of network environments of clients, and image forming apparatuses in the monitoring apparatus and a monitoring host, and newly registers an image forming apparatus in an image forming apparatus monitoring service at the time of installation of the image forming apparatus (for example, see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. H06-315059).
Further, an operator of the monitoring host determines which monitoring apparatus is to monitor the installed image forming apparatus, and after the operator informs the service man of this, a setting operation is carried out to make necessary settings of the apparatuses.
Furthermore, there has been disclosed a monitoring system including a communication control apparatus which mediates between a plurality of image forming apparatuses and a service center (also called a monitoring host) and monitors the respective numbers of sheets printed, troubles and the like of the image forming apparatuses, the monitoring system being configured such that, to reduce a load when an image forming apparatus is newly added to the monitoring system, the communication control apparatus is notified of a monitoring service start request via a display section of the image forming apparatus, and a communication test or the like is conducted between the communication control apparatus and the service center in response to the notification (for example, see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2001-016393).
Meanwhile, in recent years, image forming apparatuses to be monitored in office environments, which are essentially designed to perform network communications conforming to TCP/IP have become widely used, and accordingly it is desired that the image forming apparatus monitoring system itself should comply with the above network communications. For example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2004-005543 discloses a network-compatible image forming apparatus monitoring system. It is desired that also this network-compatible image forming apparatus monitoring system should undergo a reduced load upon processing when a new image forming apparatus to be monitored is added to the monitoring system.
However, none of the above described conventional systems is not designed to perform network connections, and it is therefore the problem how easily addition of an image forming apparatus to the monitoring system should be performed in this network environment.
In particular, under the network environment, not only the monitoring apparatus but also various devices and apparatuses such as image forming apparatuses, various kinds of servers, and client computers are connected to the network. The image forming apparatus monitoring system disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2001-016393 is not compatible with the network, and hence, a desired image forming apparatus cannot be easily selected for monitoring by the monitoring apparatus from a plurality of devices and apparatuses on the network.
Therefore, the conventional monitoring system should be desirably configured so as to reduce an installing operation load for installation of image forming apparatuses including settings relating to the monitoring apparatus.